When we think of pre-Buddhism Chinese philosophy, ideas such as filial piety and “the Dao” might come to mind. But what was at stake in the philosophical debates of early Chinese thinkers, from Confucius to Zhuangzi? What were the epistemic legacies that they have left for the world?
In Origins of Moral Political Philosophy in Early China (Oxford University Press 2021), Tao Jiang remaps the intellectual landscape of early Chinese philosophy (6th to 2nd centuries BCE) and reveals that most if not all of the classical Chinese philosophers, from Confucius to Zhuangzi, engaged with the three ideas of humaneness, justice, and personal freedom in one way or another to construct their visions of the world. By charting the trajectory of core philosophical values in early China and beyond, Jiang makes the case in the book that the philosophical dialectics between the partialist humaneness and the impartialist justice formed the fundamental dynamics underlying the mainstream moral-political project of early China, with the musing on personal freedom as the outlier.
Historically, the flourishing of these “various masters and hundred schools” (zhuzi baijia) was situated within the period between the collapse of the Zhou order, which had represented the ideal of peace and prosperity, and the rise of the Qin state, which eventually consolidated a centralized government. Jiang points out that “Almost all classical thinkers of this period were trying to reconstitute a lost order by appealing to ritual (or tradition), (human)nature, objective standards that included moral and penal codes, or some combination of these, in order to imagine, conceptualize, and construct a new world that was morally compelling and/or politically alluring.”
Professor Tao Jiang is a scholar of classical Chinese philosophy and Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy. He is the author of this new book, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China (Oxford University Press 2021), and Contexts and Dialogue: Yogācāra Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind (University of Hawai'i Press 2006), as well as the co-editor of The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China (Routledge 2017). He chairs the Department of Religion and directs the Center for Chinese Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. He is a co-chair of the Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar at Columbia University.
Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping the history of transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting early twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.
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